


Ouroboros

by kirael



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Modern Era, Multi, Past Character Death, Reincarnation, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 03:18:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10608195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirael/pseuds/kirael
Summary: It's a week before Eliza's wedding, and she wants nothing more than to crawl out of her own skin.(Or: the troubles of reincarnation and memory)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BlueGirl22](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueGirl22/gifts).



Angelica smoothed out the side of Eliza's dress, running her hands over the fabric. “Are you sure you want something so traditional?”

Eliza sat down on the chair across from the table, where the dress was spread out, and perched on top of the comfortable leather. She wore a smile that ghosted over the edges of her lips, flickering in and out. “I’m getting married in less than a week, Angie. It’s too late to order a new dress.”

The dress had been the only thing she’d splurged on. It was a luscious, silky thing that draped over her body and made her feel, just for a moment, like she was two centuries away, past too many tragedies to count. Even if the body was different, the fashion would stay the same.

Angelica nodded, still playing with the fabric of the dress. She seemed distant, had been since Eliza had dragged Alexander home and introduced him to the family. Angelica had smiled and introduced herself politely, of course, but that was before she _knew_. Knew of her past, what it meant for her to be in the present. Still, the knowledge of it hardly changed anything, except for the way she skirted expertly, elegantly around all conversation with Eliza of the before.

Despite what history said, Eliza wasn’t _stupid._ Oh, sure, she harbored little delusion that she could burn as bright as Angelica, the darling of the family, that she would ever be able to do anything but listen to Alexander’s diatribes whenever he sprouted off about the intricacies of the free market, but she listened, and she watched, and she stretched out a hand to anyone who needed it, and she had notebooks and notebooks in her neat, quick handwriting on neuroscience and cognitive development that would carry her far beyond Angelica, or Alexander, or the wedding, or that goddamned dress that she, the more she looked at it, wanted to throw into the fireplace until it burnt into ashes.

“I get it,” Margaret had said, once, fourteen and sat on Eliza’s ragged pullout bed and running a brush through her thick tangle of curly hair (they weren’t sisters, not this time, but close enough to be as good as). “I was nothing, then. I’m nothing now. But I can be something.” And she had disappeared for four years and reemerged on Eliza's first day in college, wearing a bright yellow sundress with a starling voice that took every opportunity to break out into impassioned song.

Angelica started to wrap the dress up in all its coverings, careful not to rip it. "I didn't think you'd marry him, this time around," she said.  

"What?"

Angelica turned to stare at her. Her eyes were dark. "He cheated on you," she said, matter-of-fact.

"He did," Eliza replied.

"I remember how you reacted when you found out," Angelica continued. "You were devastated. The letters alone were painful to read. I couldn’t care less about him, but I don’t want you to be hurt again.”

Eliza remembered the exact moment she heard about the affair. Of all the things, it's what she cared about the least. The woman who’d knelt next to the fireplace, clutching stacks of paper in her hands, the woman who wouldn’t talk to Hamilton for weeks, the woman who’d forgiven him in the aftermath of Philip’s death – it all felt like it was someone else. It never felt like her.

“That was before,” Eliza said. “This is now.”

“And I’d thought-“ Angelica cut herself off.

“Yes?”

Angelica closed her eyes, and when she answered she spoke in low, measured tones. “We’re closer than close, ‘Liza. I’m always honest with you. I’d just thought, after John…” Her voice trailed off.

Eliza didn’t speak. No. She avoided thinking about John. Heartache and long, fitful nights of tears lay in that direction.

It was growing dark outside. Alexander would be coming home soon.

“Where are you keeping this?” Angelica asked, hoping to break the tension.

Eliza stood up and took the dress from her. “In the guest room,” she said. She went to put it back, turning over thoughts of arson in her head. She could hear Angelica taking a phone call as she walked.

It wasn’t the dress, she decided while storing it away. It was the way she felt in it. She wanted too much. She wanted the sensible, late 18th century silhouette it bore, how every time she put it on was the first time, but –

Eliza never regretted burning the letters. The memories turning into smoke felt cleansing. The release of burden in the funeral pyre. Whose death? Whose body lay atop the hearth?

“’Liza!” Angelica called.

“Yes?” Eliza replied.

“I’ve got to run! I just got a call from the firm.”

The bright, burning star of the family. Some things didn’t change, and the thought of that made a little bubble of happiness rise up in her chest. “I’ll text you,” Eliza said.

The door slammed, and Eliza breathed out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. The house was quiet but for the sounds of traffic outside.

John – she didn’t like thinking about him, but his memory pushed and shoved its way to the forefront of her mind and refused to budge. Speaking of things that didn’t change: the recklessness. The stubbornness. The gentleness. God, if it felt like a betrayal to her, then what of Alexander, who’d cared for him even before?

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out. It was a text from Alexander. _Be home soon_ , it read, with a string of smiley faces and heart emojis at the end.

Eliza laughed and tapped out a response. _Then you just missed Angelica_.

The wait for a reply was cut in half by a knock on the door, then the sound of keys turning in the lock.

“Eliza,” Alexander said when he spotted her. He held a plastic bag in his hand full of greens, which he dropped next to the kitchen counter.

“Alex,” Eliza replied, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him into a kiss when he came near. She was smiling against his lips.

“Good evening,” Alex murmured, his forehead pressed up against hers.

Eliza huffed out a short burst of laughter and pulled away. “You bought groceries?” she asked.

Alexander shrugged. “I wanted to cook today,” he said. “You said you wanted to get some work in before the wedding.”

There it was. Two centuries ago, Elizabeth Schuyler had stayed with Alexander Hamilton despite a devastating affair. Eliza smiled and brought her computer from their room so that she could sit in the living room and listen to the sound of Alexander cooking.

Because – because it didn’t matter. Eliza could feel the keyboard keys giving way under the light pressure of her fingers, could feel the echo of the wedding dress on her hands, could see Alexander working to chop the vegetables, sleeves rolled up and hair pulled up into a bun, could smell the rich scent of cooking meat.

-

John wore a black leather jacket that he treated with as much respect as he treated most other things – with careless blunder and like he was heading to destroy it. In those days, he wore his clothes until they ran thin and holes littered the fabric. The jacket – he draped it over Eliza’s shoulders, joking how he was a perfectly chivalrous gentleman, and Eliza scowled but appreciated it nonetheless.

The thin sleeves of her shirt did little to protect her from the spring breeze. She slipped her arms into the jacket sleeves to wear it properly.

John seemed barely fazed, walking with a thicker long-sleeved shirt and his hands in his pockets. “How was home?” he asked.

“Lovely,” Eliza said. “Angelica asked me to say hi to you and Alexander.”

John hid his smile in the sharp burst of laughter that erupted from him. “She still holding on to that torch?”

Eliza scowled and elbowed him in the side; it wasn’t that hard, more playful than anything, but he stumbled back, his hand on his chest, and gasped in mock pain.

“I’m hurt,” he said, and Eliza laughed lightly.

A biker rushed past them, jingling the bicycle bell as he did so. The air was cool and crisp, and with the jacket on, Eliza felt far more comfortable.

“Hey,” John said, softer. “You know how before you left, I mentioned the, uh, thing?” He’d stopped walking.

Eliza turned to look at him. John’s curls fell in his face, but he didn’t move to brush them off, and he was slightly hunched in his stance. He looked, oddly enough, almost vulnerable. It reminded Eliza of the first time she met him, all dark eyes and wild hair, a quick tongue and a bitter smile.

“What is it?” she asked, stepping closer to him.

Don’t shoot until you see the white of their eyes. Limited bullets, limited range. Eliza pressed John’s hand into hers and led him further along the path until they came to a secluded area so they’d be alone. Someone had hung up a swing in the branches of the old oak tree a year ago, and Eliza firmly seated John on the wooden plank.

John pumped his legs lazily, hooking his arms around the rope of the swing.

Eliza placed their bags at the foot of the tree and clambered up to a large, hooked branch so that she could sit in it and listen to John.

“Okay,” she said. “Confess.”

John stared down at the ground. “You remember how I told you before you left that I thought I was reincarnated?”

Eliza kept her face carefully passive, though John wasn’t actually looking at her. “Yes,” she said.

John kicked his feet out. “Well, yeah,” he said. “That. I’ve been having these weird dreams. I go to bed, and I wake up, and I’m covered in grime and running through the forest with a group of other men with me, and there’s a gun in my hand that I inexplicably know how to use, and I’m wearing this blue jacket and tall boots, and I hear people shouting my name – but it’s not my current name, it’s my name from before, and then there’s a bullet in my chest and I wake up.”

Eliza had suspected, of course, but nothing so drastic. “What do you think of it?” she asked. She picked at the bark of the tree, scraping it off with her nail.

John leaned back in the swing, holding on with his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like – it’s so real.”

“If you’re correct, and you have been reincarnated, then it was real. Is that the only kind of dream you have?”

“No,” John said. He kicked out and swung higher, and higher, and higher, and jumped up, over the path, and landed on the soft grass on the other side.

Eliza pushed herself up and handed John his things when he came over to her. He pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“What other kinds of dreams do you have?” she asked.”

“We should head back,” he said. “Alex is probably waiting for us.”

“Don’t think I’ve let this conversation go,” Eliza threatened. She hooked her arm with John’s.

“I wouldn’t dare,” John replied.

-

Eliza clung to Alexander, still sweaty and sticky. She was fully awake, all too aware of the body fluids making themselves present and irritable on her skin. Alexander was fast asleep, his light snores audible in the dead quiet of the night.

It was dark, but Eliza could see the light from the sidewalk drifting in through the curtains and lighting up the smallest sliver of the room.

Alexander…she wondered how much he remembered, of before. For both of them, their memories had arrived after John’s death. The first night, Alexander had woken up in tears and went outside for a run. Eliza was left alone in their bed for three, still blurry-eyed and exhausted from the grief. She’d woken herself up, poured a glass of water, and watched late night television until she passed out on the couch. When Alexander came back home, the sun had already risen, and Eliza was eating cereal and getting it everywhere, like some child.

“John Laurens,” Alexander had said. After those two words, nothing else for the rest of the day. Eliza did the research herself.

John. Alexander. Eliza. The pieces fit together too well.

Eliza closed her eyes, willing herself to go back to sleep. She had a busy day tomorrow, and it wouldn’t do to ruin it with a supreme lack of sleep.

“Should we break up?” Eliza had asked, three months after John’s death and two weeks after her own revelation.

Alexander had stared at her, in a mixture of shock and weary resignation and the feeling that this was another disappointment in a long series of disappointments.

“History repeats,” Eliza had said. “John’s death, us. You know what happened the last time we married.”

They had broken up for a brief time, after that, Alexander righteously furious that she would suggest that he still hasn’t learned from his mistakes. He was probably right, looking back, but everything was too muddled anyway, the waters so polluted it was impossible to make your way through without sinking into a particularly deep patch of water. Eliza didn’t wade; she swam, doing her best to keep her head above the waves.

Her heart was racing far too fast. She could feel it beating rapidly under the skin, unrelenting.

“Alexander,” Eliza whispered.

Alexander stirred lightly. “Mmm?”

“Alexander,” Eliza said, “I’m taking a shower.”

“Mmm.” Alexander rolled over so that he was on his side and Eliza could get up.

The tiles of the bathroom were cool under her feet, and the cheap fluorescent lighting emphasized the lines in her face, making her look about a billion years older. She rubbed at her eyes and turned on the water in the shower, holding her hand under the spray until it had turned a semi-respectable temperature. Still, when she stepped in, it was too hot and her skin burned bright red under the water.

Eliza was an artist at heart. When she had time to pick up the brush, she painted with long, harsh strokes that connected the body; the rounded swell of breasts there, the sharp line of the jaw there, the pale rouge that dotted the lips there. Whenever she played at artistry, she thought it her job to express the truth of her vision.

Eliza let the water wash down her back.

There was no truth in this; there was just tangled threads wrapped all around each other in a caricature of order. Too late, now, to call it all off. Not that she wanted to. Alexander was…she could spend a thousand lifetimes by his side and never tire of it.

She rubbed shampoo into her hair and hummed a song under her breath, an aimless little tune that meandered and tripped over itself. What was the saying? Decorate time with music, space with art. A song of comfort, just for herself.

Eliza heard the creak of the door as Alexander stepped into the room.

“’Liza?” he asked. “Could I join?”

Eliza laughed and said her assent.

Alexander pushed the shower curtain aside and stepped in with her. There were deep bags under his eyes from exhaustion that Eliza desperately wanted to rub away.

“The water’s a bit hot,” he said, reaching around her to turn the temperature down.

As Eliza turned around to fully wash the shampoo away, Alexander moved his hands so that they rested lightly on her hips. Eliza made a soft noise and ran her fingers through the full length of her hair a few times before turning back around.

“Not now,” she murmured.

Alexander nodded and let go.

Strange things – Alexander did what she asked of him, this time around. If she told him to come home early because it was one of the rare days when she did, he found an excuse and walked with her to the park where they’d chat and people watch and find a quaint little café where they could sit outside and sip tea together, disgustingly lovesick.

After they’d finished showering, they fell back into bed after changing into their pajamas. Alexander curled into Eliza’s side, and his body was warm and gentle on hers.

-

Two months after John’s death, Eliza dreamed of a candlelit ballroom, and bullets, and blood seeping through clothing (how was she ever supposed to wash that off?).

She woke up, and she screamed. She was alone that night, Alexander having buried himself in work, often not coming back to their shitty apartment for days on end. It was too quiet for any words. The drifting silence in the aftermath of a disaster.

When the terror had subsided, she forced herself to walk to the bathroom. She didn’t look at herself in the mirror. She knew what she looked like – nothing less than half of a human, her hair greasy and unkempt, her eyes framed by deep purple bags. She kept forgetting to take her estrogen pills too, and she missed meals more times she could count. God.

She turned on the sink and splashed water into her face. According to the pale light flickering in through the windows, it was early morning, the sun just beginning to rise. She had to laugh at the irony of it; the sunrise as the symbol of a new beginning, and yet her life seemed to end, right then and there, overshadowed by someone else’s grandeur.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. The name tasted bitter on her tongue. She washed out her mouth with Listerine, almost gagging on the flavor. She thought it was a miracle she didn’t throw up.

God. Jesus fuck.

Eliza applied her makeup with a shaking hand and when the lipstick, for once, went where it was supposed to, almost burst out into a fit of screaming. “Grief makes the body heavy,” Angelica had said when Eliza refused to talk to say a word at the funeral, but surely she was wrong, or why was Eliza’s tongue so goddamned ready to fly out of her mouth and strangle herself?

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. What a name. It belonged to someone else, not her. Never her.  

 _Ha,_ she thought _._

Eliza stretched out the corners of her eyes childishly, to make them look thinner, the way the kids had mocked in elementary school, and thought about a woman two hundred years gone, with pasty pale skin that had never seen the sun but for the finery draped on her skin. Eliza was dressed in yesterday’s t-shirt and jeans and wanted, with all the sincerity in her heart, to be anyone else but herself.

Mrs. Hamilton could do. Had to do.

Maybe if she –

There were tears trickling down her cheek, threatening to ruin her carefully applied mascara, and she grabbed a paper towel to quickly dry it off before it could do any major damage. She tied up her hair in a ponytail and tried to look like anything other than a ghost.  

Eliza thought about time, and she thought about the way it moved, and thought about herself, trapped in a prison of her own flesh, and she smashed the bathroom mirror.

Later, when Alexander was staring in shock at the broken glass she hadn’t cleaned up, he asked, “Why?” like there was a reason why there was a writhing mass of vipers in her head that threatened to bite whenever she moved to untangle them. Did she even want to? Messy, messy metaphors.

Eliza wasn’t sure what she was, now. She’d taken pieces of John, and of Alexander and of Angelica and of Margaret and of anyone else she could get her hands on, and stitched herself from them, and now it was all thoroughly displaced by this woman who rammed her way into Eliza’s life and claimed it as her own.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and Alexander hugged her tightly and whispered that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

She almost choked on the kindness. Jesus fucking Christ.

-

Wedding day. Angelica helped Eliza put on the gown and did her makeup, dabbing on only a light layer of lip-gloss and barest bit of mascara.

“You look beautiful,” Angelica said. Eliza believed her, and she held her head high as she then, in turn, helped Angelica with her own dress.

“Good luck,” Angelica said, slipping out, leaving her alone.

Eliza looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair, kept natural, flowed down her back a neat, straight stream. She looked beautiful, sure, but her dress felt off now that it was her wedding day. Hung weird.

Maybe Angelica was right after all. Perhaps she was now just tempting fate, inviting her in and setting up the table and the plates and inviting her in so that she could suck their blood out.

Or maybe that was just vampires. Eliza let out a small huff of laughter.

She was slightly cold, she thought.

There was a leather jacket draped over a chair from when one of the bridesmaids – Margaret, probably – left it there when changing.

With barely a second thought, Eliza slipped it on and walked out onto the stage.  


End file.
